Macs, Modularity and More

Vote for UTF-8 as the default text format in Eclipse

I raised a bug against Eclipse that it should adopt UTF-8 as the default for all text files after reading Elliotte Rusty Harold's excellent piece on IBM DeveloperWorks. Although Elliotte was specifically discussing XML documents, it's just as applicable to any other text document that Eclipse may have created.

Somewhat annoyingly, the bug was re-classified from 'All text' to 'Java text files' which isn't a true reflection of the bug itself, b ut if you belive that text files should use portable document encodings so that they can be portably used on all platforms (not just the one it was created one) then please vote for the bug, or add your thoughts to the bug history.

Although UTF-8 is supported, it's not the default; and it would be better to use a portable format by default for *all* Eclipse uses, not just those relating to JDT. In fact, it may be even more important for RCP apps, since they aren't likely to present the user with a choice for changing the default. If you really want to hack it, you can place a -Dfile.encoding=UTF-8 on the command line, or file.encoding in the eclipse.ini file; but that's a hack, not a solution.